Sitemeter

Amazon

May 01, 2005

Lost causes

Granted, I'm waging warfare with all the resources at my command, but I fear that my armies are lying bloody on the battlefield. At any rate, they're covered with red ink.

"The poem, 'My Sister's Sleep,' by Christina Rossetti..." I know it's a poem. You know it's a poem. The entire class knows it's a poem. Do you really need to tell me that it's a poem? And do you need to tell me this more than once?

Shallots. Good when cooked. Not good in papers about Tennyson.

"Seems." It seems to me that many essays seem to have an aversion to seeming to talk about what the work under discussion seems to say.

"These works have many similarities and many differences." This. Means. Nothing. Absolutely. Nothing. (Insert instructor banging her forehead against the desk here.)

Another and another and another and...

I'm beginning to feel sorry for the semi-colon. Has any other punctuation mark ever caused so many dark nights of the soul?

I harbor a sneaking suspicion that my students have read too much James Michener. Nothing else can explain essays that try to begin from the absolute beginning. One of these days, someone is going to hand me a paper that begins, "Before Wordsworth, dinosaurs walked the earth."

TrackBack

» "BEFORE WORDSWORTH, DINOSAURS WALKED THE EARTH" from Pejmanesque
This is quite funny. However, I would beg for a little generosity for those who use "seems" and "appears" abundantly. Lawyers, after all, are trained to write inter-office memos by analyzing both sides of a legal question scrupulously instead of... [Read More]

Tracked on May 13, 2005 at 04:46 PM

Comments

my students try to pull this crap too! argh.

another thing that bugs me is when they use neutral words like "affected" without elaborating on exactly HOW the thing was affected. (i grudgingly give them props, though, for using the correct spelling).

I work in a writing center - at the end of the semester, it's all I can do to keep it together when paper after paper, no matter what the topic, wants to begin with "throughout human history." When I gently suggest different (more specific!) phrasing, some of them cry. Finals week.

And the semicolon is a sacred thing. I give passionate lectures on how to avoid the abuse of the semicolon at least weekly.

I had many students (pun intended) tell me on their mid-term essays that there were "many reasons" for the American Revolution. And on their papers, I get comments like "The Red Badge of Courage is brilliant" or "descriptive"--words that signify nothing without explanation.

It's not all students, though -- witness this article in the latest Atlantic, where the author makes the teetering, terribly unconvincing leap from Anna Nicole Smith to the coming death shortage in a scant two paragraphs:

I've had MANY English teachers tell me to start off by identifying what exactly it is that I am writing about. The examples almost always start off something like, "The poem, 'My Sister's Sleep,' by Christina Rossetti..." Yes, students feel the need to tell you that it is a poem because they fear that points will be taken off if they don't.

Hello. Arrived here via Pejmanesque. Now that you've complained about the students, heads up for the teachers:
Most of the teachers I had absolutely hated the semicolon. I use it. I do not abuse it. But they always opted for the period, anyway.
Many of my teachers graded my papers with generosity and intelligence. But some truly could not tolerate dissent. If I did not think Foucault was a genius (he wasn't. He was a sadomasochistic homosexual who thought the entire world behaved the way he did and those who didn't, were fakes), then I got a B. Ditto if I happened to disagree with another teacher on Antigone, or the Dickensian habit of creating saints and villains in his novels. I graduated with honors, but the nitpicking of teachers who were not critical of my syntax, or style, or grammar, but of my (textually-based and documented) opinions, left me rather disappointed in a career that I wanted to make my own. Finally, it should not be a coincidence that those teachers I had problems with, did not want to be called teachers, but "professors." Go figure.

I learned from a student, a long time ago, that "Divorce in the middle-ages was less common than it is today. That's probably because people died before they got sick of each other." Seems fairly accurate.

Blanche Dubious. Too funny. My guess is that is due to an overzealous auto spellcheck feature. The newest Word drove me nuts when I wrote legal papers for school until I disabled half the auto changes.